The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

Sydney Morning Herald, 31 August 2007

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116 

See Rosalind Dixon, ‘A New (Inter)National Human Rights Experiment for Australia’ (2012) 

23 Public Law Review 75; George Williams and Lisa Burton, ‘Australia’s Exclusionary Parlia-

mentary Model of Rights Protection’ (2013) 34 Statute Law Review 58.

117 

See further on this political proposal, referred to as a ‘Voice to Parliament’, the Uluru State-

ment from the Heart; and the Referendum Council, Final Report (2017).

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370 

Rosalind Dixon and Gabrielle Appleby

balancing of rights and other constitutional values is consistent with Australia’s 

dominant political-legal community’s greater comfort with legislative judg-

ment in such areas.

This, we suggest, is also ultimately explained by the longstanding resistance 

in Australian political culture – particularly elite political culture – toward 

almost any forms of rights-based judicial review – whether based on express or 

implied (or extra-textual) constitutional sources.

The wider Australian public has not always been suspicious of judicial 

review of this kind. In a public poll conducted in 1991, 59 per cent of respond-

ents supported the courts having the ultimate authority to determine rights and 

freedoms, in comparison to 41 per cent who thought that role should fall to 

Parliament.

118

 This survey was undertaken prior to the Mason Court’s contro-

versial decisions in Mabo, ACTV and Nationwide News (all decided in 1992).

119

 

While there has been no equivalent survey undertaken subsequently, in 2009 

the Brennan Committee conducted a large public consultation regarding the 

implementation of a statutory national human rights charter. The Committee 

received written submissions and conducted sixty-six community roundtables. 

The Committee summarised these consultations to the effect that there was 

clear ‘majority support’ for a statutory human rights instrument, though also 

substantial opposition to any constitutional and statutory rights instruments 

that would cause a transfer of power to ‘unelected judges’.

120

Australian political and legal elites have tended to be consistently wary of 

broad-based judicial scrutiny in the domain of individual rights – or open-

ended forms of judicial scrutiny of legislative policy choices. Foundationally, 

this suspicion can be traced back to the inherently contradictory nature of the 

two constitutional traditions that most heavily influenced Australian consti-

tutionalism: the British principle of parliamentary supremacy, and the prin-

ciple inherent in the adoption of a written, US-style constitution that sets out 

the minimum rules that all actors within the legal system must comply with, 

enforced by an independent judicial branch. In the context of individual 

rights (that is, outside of federalism and separation of powers), British tradi-

tions have also largely predominated. While, as we identify previously, it is not 

correct to say that the Australian Constitution contains no bill of rights, it is 

118 

Brian Galligan et al., Rights in Australia 1991–1992: National Household Sample (Canberra, 

ACT: Australian Data Archive, Australian National University, 1992).

119 

Paul  Kildea and George  Williams, ‘The Mason Court’  in Rosalind Dixon and George  

Williams, The High Court, The Constitution and Australian Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2015) 244, 257.

120 

Commonwealth of Australia, National Human Rights Consultation Report’ (September 2009) 

(‘Brennan Report’) 16.

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